That Someone Guilty Be Punished - International Center for ...

II. Background
An overview of Bosnia’s relationship to the ICTY is a necessary foundation for the analysis
that forms the heart of this report. This chapter provides essential background information,
focusing on those aspects of the ICTY’s historical and evolving relationship to Bosnia that are
relevant to our further analysis. As such, it is necessarily selective.
A. The Creation of the ICTY
A defining fact of the ICTY’s work in Bosnia and its relationship to the country is that the
Security Council created the Tribunal when Bosnia was experiencing the full force of nationalist
fury. By the time the Council formally created the ICTY in May 1993, 44 Bosnia had endured
what were routinely described as “the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II,” gruesomely
reported in the daily media, for over a year. 45 As Europe and the United States moved
toward recognizing the independence of Bosnia in early April 1992, Bosnian Serbs supported
by Serbia launched a war whose principal aim was to establish Serb control over parts of Bosnian
territory, linking it to Serbia and Montenegro. While Croatian Serbs, backed by Belgrade,
had similarly fought to prevent Croatia from seceding ten months earlier, the war in Bosnia
would prove even fiercer. 46 From the beginning of the war, Bosnian Serb forces carried out
brutal policies of “ethnic cleansing”—the forcible removal of Bosniak and Croat populations
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